1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a scheme for posting advertisements in relation to Web pages on a display screen of a comprehensive information viewing device capable of displaying multiple Web pages simultaneously such as that disclosed in Japanese Patent Application Laid Open No. 2000-099232.
2. Description of the Related Art
Conventionally, an advertisement is posted on a Web page by securing a region for an advertisement within a window for displaying the Web page and displaying a banner advertisement in that region, or by opening another window separately from the Web page and displaying an advertisement within that another window.
However, among these conventional advertisement posting schemes, a scheme for displaying a banner advertisement has been associated with a problem that the Web page contents display region becomes smaller because the Web page contents display region and the advertisement display region must coexist within the same window, as well as a problem that it is difficult to provide a large advertisement display region.
Also, a scheme for displaying the advertisement within another window has been associated with a problem that a region in which the Web page window can be displayed becomes smaller within a total display region of the information viewing device because there is a need to provide a separate advertisement window.
On the other hand, there has been a Web page image formation system for forming images of multiple Web pages acquired from Web servers and presenting them to client systems, which is intended to be applied to on-line services using multiple Web page images through a computer network such as an on-line shopping service using multiple product Web pages and an image library service using multiple image Web pages, for example. This Web page image formation system forms images of desired Web pages acquired by accessing to Web servers through the Internet by using a Web browser according to the need in response to Web page image requests from client systems, and presents these Web page images to the client systems.
FIG. 1 shows a conventional Web page image formation system for providing a service using formation of images of multiple Web pages, in which a single system 101 requiring formation of Web page images acquires multiple Web pages from a plurality of Web servers 103, forms their images, and displays these multiple Web page images on a display 105.
In this conventional Web page image formation system, the acquisition and image formation of multiple Web pages are carried out by a single system 101, so that there has been a problem that the system load becomes high.
Namely, there are also a problem that the network traffics are concentrated as multiple Web pages must be acquired, and a problem that the system processing load becomes high as images of multiple Web pages must be formed.
In addition, the specifications related to the WWW are frequently extended while the specifications related to HTML, style sheet, XML, etc. are frequently updated, so that there is a need for frequent version up of the Web page image formation processing unit in order to deal with such extensions or updates of the specifications. However, this would make the system running extremely tedious especially in the case of distributing the system to a user where it is necessary to require the user of the system to carry out the version up operation. Thus there is a problem that modifications are required whenever the latest WWW specifications are to be accounted for.